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Curious About International Institutions

I've applied to a couple institutions abroad (either they were cheap or free to apply to) and now that I'm getting acceptances back, I'm not entirely sure how feasible they really are as options. So I'm looking for some help.

I've gotten University of Glasgow, Jacobs University Bremen, and University of Sydney. Now I'm involved with Rotary and so I can find contacts throughout the world in one to two degrees of separation so I'm wondering about like residency requirements and the establishment of them because I could potentially bring down tuition from like $32,000 a year to $7,000 a year or something like that.

If anybody has any advice on that or scholarships or just experience with schools in those countries (Scotland, Germany, Australia), it would be very much appreciated! Thanks!!

Replies to: Curious About International Institutions

You are not easily going to be able to establish residency there as an international student - that would destroy the whole purpose of non-resident fees!

You can easily find the formal requirements for resident fees on the website of each university. For example, the University of Glasgow has a page titled Fee Status that refers you to this government website here.

You can read through the formal requirements but the gist of it is this: if you want to pay home or EU fees, you'd need to be an "ordinary resident" (not on a temporary visa) of the UK or an EU national, and you must have lived in Europe for at least 3 years before you start college. There are a few exceptions, e.g. for refugees, but you probably don't qualify for any of those.

Jacobs University is a private university with no discounted fees for resident students.

The University of Sydney's rules are much simpler: you are a domestic student for fee purposes if you are a citizen of Australia or New Zealand, or a legal permanent resident of Australia, and an international student otherwise. That's explained in the International Undergraduate Guide.

You are currently living in the US, right? Do you think the US would have so many undocumented immigrants if it was easy to acquire US citizenship or permanent resident status? Don't expect that to be much easier in other countries...

The UK explicitly says that you'd need to live there for three years before starting college, or you would need to make a convincing case that you'd be also living in the UK if you were not attending a university there. You also cannot be on a student visa if you want to pay home fees. I can think of two scenarios to satisfy both demands: you could marry a UK citizen, or maybe your parents would qualify for a permanent resident visa and your whole family could relocate to the UK.

Thanks so much! I was totally looking at that the wrong way. Now loophole time! I know that I could be eligible for in-state tuition in say California if an aunt or uncle over there picked me up as my legal parents/guardians on tax forms and a few other forms. Once again, I think this would obviously include much more paperwork overseas, but would it even be remotely possible?

Well, you can see what the formal requirements are. Do you have any way of fulfilling them? Most people don't have a claim to citizenship in another country, or the patience to live somewhere for 3 years before they start college.

Right. I totally get that. But "formal" requirements aside, can I simply 'tag on' to a family already living there; can they add me as a dependent or something similar? I've heard of people coming to the US and doing that, just not vice versa.

Okay yah... I mean like, and this is just an example, a friend that I met through Rotary came to the US for a year on a temporary visa which he extended; but since he was staying with an American family he was charged the in-state rate when he went to college (he was from Argentina).

^ I bet there's more to the story. Probably your friend received a scholarship that waived the out-of-state tuition portion. The other alternative is that he was on a visa other than a student visa. ("Temporary" visa holders are allowed to establish state residency but it must be a temporary visa with immigration intent, not a student or tourist visa.)

That aside, have you actually read the residency classification guidelines of the foreign universities? They are requirements for the student, not the student's family. The student must be an Australian citizen or permanent resident; the student must be an EU national who's resided in Europe not primarily for the purposes of a full-time education in the past 3 years; etc.

Your methods of trying to "latch on" to anything seem misguided and sneaky. You can't just decide to try to become an immediate resident by living with someone. These universities have some very smart people working in their admissions offices; they'll figure you out.

You'd arguably receive a better education at a good-but-not-great American university than at a good-but-not-great foreign university. For example, one of the main obstacle that European students face when they want to apply to graduate school in the US are letters of recommendations; European professors don't interact with undergraduate students (it's considered a 'waste of their time'). If you appreciate flexibility in choosing your courses, foreign universities aren't for you either.

Unless you actually intend to emigrate to another country, you are way better off going to college in the US.

It's interesting you bring this up kcj2196, as I was recently a participant in an educational forum attended by international university students from China, India, Japan, Korea and Russia going overseas. There was a portion of the conference that effectively ranked the overseas countries with the most appealing options.

The #1 preferred country to my surprise, was Germany, and the next in the Top Five were Switzerland, France, Sweden and the Netherlands. The general feature especially for Germany is that you will pay more if you're a non-citizen, but it's still very much manageable, and if you agree to work in the country after you graduate, most of these countries have structured repayment systems that will help you to work it off reasonably quickly so long as you're a productive and law-abiding citizen.

I think this may be a much better alternative than trying to get residency status, which in practice is incredibly difficult to pull off, or would otherwise require years as people are pointing out. You'll of course have to learn German which is becoming a kind of common academic language in many of the best countries, but it's well worth it if you want to attend internationally.

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